©2022 Alicia Dara
Last month I took on a new Power Voice client I’ll call Priya*, a woman in her mid-30s with dark red curls and perfect cat-eye liner. She contacted me about helping her prepare for her annual performance review. Priya had worked at the same mid-sized medical company for the past few years, and although she’d previously had good reviews, this year she had a new manager and was uncertain about how to proceed. Something had happened with him recently that left her feeling drained of her usual confidence, and she wanted to get it back before she did the review.
At our first Power Voice session Priya told me about the incident. It happened at the company’s all-hands summer picnic back in June, when the whole staff gathered at a local park to enjoy an afternoon of food, friends, and fun. The event was catered by a few different food trucks, and there were lawn games to play and bikes to ride. After winning a croquet game with a group of her co-workers, Priya decided to get some vegan tacos from one of the food trucks. While she was standing in line for her food, she noticed that the truck was running out of napkins, and offered to bring them a roll of paper towels from her car. The truck owner, named Dave, accepted gratefully, and gave Priya a big plate of tacos to thank her. At the end of the day Dave came over to where Priya was sitting with her boss and a few co-workers. He thanked Priya again, and as they chatted they realized they had a mutual friend from college in common. They started reminiscing about the friend and the old days, and Priya was laughing loud. Right in the middle of her and Dave’s conversation, her boss leaned over and said to her, “OK girl, tone it down now!”
Priya’s face went red, and she froze. Her boss went back to his own conversation, but she couldn’t speak at all, so she waved goodbye to Dave and got up to leave. Priya’s co-workers, who witnessed the whole thing, left with her, and they walked back to the parking lot together, but Priya was still too angry to talk, so she drove home. Reflecting on the incident during our session, she was concerned that she might be overreacting, so I asked her how her boss behaved in general toward everyone in the workplace. She told me that as an “employee perk” he would bring in a manicurist for the women in the office once a month, but take the men out for drinks. At the beginning of the year he had announced that he would be renting a weekly “outside location” for client meetings, but it was a golf course. She also said that he was a chronic interrupter of women during meetings, something she hadn’t actually noticed until a male colleague pointed it out to her. (All of these things are huge red flags about how a company views its female employees, and should not be ignored.) Lastly, although her boss had recently ordered a series of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) trainings for “the whole company”, he himself had refused to take part in any of them.
No wonder, then, that he behaved the way he did toward Priya at the company picnic. Comments like “Tone it down!” fall under the category of sexist social shaming, whereby women are told that we are “too much”, “too loud” or simply taking up too much space in social environments. Women in male-dominated work environments also experience these sexist behaviors, and frequently feel like they have to make themselves smaller and quieter in order to survive. The effect is that their voices, individually and collectively, are not equally valued, which can translate to things like a lack of access to decision-making processes, no salary parity, and few women in company leadership (more red flags to be aware of!)
During our next few sessions we prepared the talking points for Priya’s performance review, which described her year of hard work in quantifiable terms. We also strategized some ways for her to stand firm in her power and get what she wanted (namely a raise). I reminded her that performance reviews are a good opportunity to tell your employer what will keep you happy and productive on the job. I also encouraged her to speak to her boss about the incident at the picnic, and give him the chance to understand her perspective and apologize for shaming her publicly. By the end of our sessions she sounded great: strong, confident and calm, exactly the way you want to be when you’re advocating for yourself under pressure.
On the day of her performance review Priya was feeling good, and she took that feeling with her into the meeting with her boss. She went through her pitch, and did it very well. She stated exactly what she wanted, which was a 15% raise, and to her great surprise, her boss agreed. Then he asked her if there was anything else she needed, and she stopped for a minute, thinking about what to do next. She let him know how his behavior at the picnic was harmful, and how it had affected her, and calmly added that she would appreciate an apology. He laughed in her face and told her to forget it (his exact words were, “Never gonna happen.”)
Priya quit on the spot!
Crafting her performance review, and seeing the amazing ways she had expanded the impact of her work in just one short year, flipped a permanent switch in her brain. Priya realized that her high-quality work had become distinctly high-value, and she was no longer willing to accept the environment she’d been working in for the past few years. She was willing to take a chance on that realization by putting herself back in the job market. Yesterday Priya emailed me to say she just accepted a job with a bigger, better company that offered her a 15% raise, which she had negotiated up to 20%, using the quantifiable data points we had created for her performance review as leverage.
If you feel that you are consistently undervalued at your job, it might be time to quit. If you feel that you’re fairly compensated but not taken seriously or given work that challenges you, it might be time to quit. If you notice that there doesn’t seem to be a leadership path for women at your company, it might be time to quit. If you and the women around you are shut out of important business opportunities, it might be time to quit. If you’ve consistently experienced sexist and/or racist behaviors in your workplace, it might be time to quit. If you’re experiencing several, or all, of these issues? Time to quit!
I’d love to help you craft your next performance review. Email me for rates and availability.